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Project: KoG (Part 1)

Those of you who have been reading the blog for a while now (or could be bothered to look through the archives) will know that I have a resin kit of the Knight of Gold from the Five Star Stories. I’ve had it for quite a while now but never really got into building it for several reasons;

1) it’s ridiculously complex! I have said this before put the number of parts to this kit vastly exceed any and every other kit I have in my collection. In fact it has more than the next 2 combined!

2) a lot of the parts are very small and still require cleanup. The resin used also isn’t the best and is quite brittle, thereby increasing the chance of a major mess up which cannot be fixed.

I basically got around the problem by getting an abundance of (misplaced?) overconfidence now that I have 4 more kits under my belt. I also decided to try and break it down into smaller projects as opposed to one long, continuous one like I normally do. So I’m going to do the legs first and then lower and upper bodies separately and eventually build it up instead of doing a complete pre-build and painting the whole thing in 1 go. It will allow me to focus on a small bit at a time and, hopefully, stop me from getting overwhelmed.

3) But the biggest issue was that, with a name like “knight of gold” you would want it to be, well, GOLD!! But as I explained with my lancelot, the actual colour of gold is really REALLY hard to get right!!

But using the information I was able to gather when I was mixing the gold for the lancelot, I was able to mix a colour I was happy with. And it only took a year to work out the solution to the problem. What does it look like?

Like a fair few other people, I thought that the original mix I made for the lancelot was too dark. Gold paint, in general, dry to leave a very dull colour which wouldn’t be suitable. I played around with the idea of suing the gold colour gundam markers but those colours are incredibly hard to get an even layer and fade dramatically over time. Normally, I paint the parts sliver and then use yellow ink to give a really shiny look to it. An example of the look can be seen on the jacket of my Yoko kit as the gold trim was done using that method.

It’s a great method for gold detailing and small areas but not good for large ones as the ink doesn’t dry evenly so you can see brush marks and an uneven distribution of the ink means that some areas end up slightly darker than others depending on where the ink settles.

The lancelot showed me that you can get a pretty good gold colour by mixing metallic colours with yellow ink together instead of in separate layers. It also gives you the ability to apply an even coat easily as it’s one paint mix.

For the lancelot, I used the darkest metallic colour I had as I didn’t want the same effect as my usual method with silver. The silver mixed gold would have been far too bright and viewers would probably have to look at it using sunglasses! But it seemed that the darkest metal colour ended up making the gold too dark once dried, so I used a middle colour for the KoG batch.

At first I used Chainmail from miniature paints and mixed it with yellow ink, which got me a very good shade of gold but with a twist, The paint had a very strong glitter effect which got passed onto the paint! Think Alex Louis Armstrong from FullMetal Alchemist when he poses and you get an idea. The tone and brightness were good but the “bling” had to go. So I mixed in some Games workshop chainmail and reduced the glitter. It’s still there, but hardly noticeable. But it helps to show up the vibrancy of the paint. The hard part will be mixing another batch without making it too dissimilar to what has already been used.

The ratio mix was rougly 1:1:3 for glitter chainmail/flat chainmail/yellow ink. (You need a lot of ink before the colour starts to show)

In any case, progress with the KoG is on the move and I’ve also started on a second project as well, which I think I’ll be focusing mostly on, with my attention returning to the KoG infrequently. but at least the ball is rolling after almost a year of no activity…